The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Tenth Lecture

[ 1 ] There are many myths and legends of the ancient Egyptians that were well known in the spiritual scientific worldview and are becoming known again, but which are not actually conveyed in the external, historical tradition reported by the Egyptians. Some of these myths have been preserved for us in the form in which they became established in Greece, for the greater part of Greek legends not relating to Zeus and his family originated in the Egyptian mysteries. And today we will have to deal with all kinds of legends that we need, even if contemporary cultural history claims that there is actually little in Greek mythology that is relevant to human beings.

[ 2 ] Why did we need to look at the other side of human development, so to speak, that is, the spiritual side? Everything we see on the physical plane always remains an event, a fact of the physical plane. But in spiritual science, we are not only interested in what lives on the physical plane, but also in everything that goes on in the spiritual worlds.

[ 3 ] We know from what we have heard in spiritual science lectures what happens to human beings between death and a new birth. We need only remember that at death, human beings pass into the state of consciousness we call Kamaloka, in which, even though they have become spiritual beings, they are held back by the astral body. This is the time when human beings still demand something from the physical world, when they suffer from being deprived of something because they are no longer in the physical world. Then comes the time when man must prepare himself for a new life: the state of consciousness of Devachan, where man is no longer directly connected with the physical world, with what physical impressions are. If we want to imagine how Kamaloka life differs from Devachan life, we can consider two examples.

[ 4 ] We know that when a person dies, they do not immediately lose their desires and wishes. Let us assume that a person was a gourmet during their life who took great pleasure in delicious food. When he dies, this hedonism, this desire for delicious food, is not immediately lost. The person does not have these desires in the physical body, but in the astral body. Therefore, because the person retains the astral body after death, he also retains the desire, but he lacks the organ to satisfy these desires: the physical body. The desire for food does not depend on the physical body, but on the astral body, and after death a true craving arises in humans for what satisfied them most in life. Therefore, humans suffer after death until they have lost the desire for pleasure, until they have cast off everything that they have nurtured through their physical organs. As long as this lasts, the person remains in Kamaloka. Then begins the time when the person no longer makes demands of this kind, which can only be satisfied through physical organs. Then he enters Devachan.

[ 5 ] To the same extent that the person ceases to be bound to the physical world, to the same extent he begins to gain consciousness of the Devachanic world. It shines more and more brightly. Only, he does not yet have the ego-consciousness that he has in this life. He is not yet independent there. In Devachan life, the human being feels like a limb, like an organ of the entire spiritual world. Just as the hand would only feel itself as a limb of the physical organism if it had feeling, so the human being feels in his Devachan consciousness: I am a member of the spiritual world, a member also of the higher beings. He will only grow toward his independence. But even now he is already working there with the cosmos, he is working with the plant kingdom from the spiritual world. Man works with everything, not out of his own calculation, but as a serving member of the spiritual world. When we describe what humans experience between death and a new birth, we must not imagine that the events of the devachanic world are not also subject to change. Humans have a secret awareness that although our Earth is changeable, everything remains the same on the other side of death. This is not the case at all. When the stay in Devachan is described in this way today, it means that this is approximately the present state of Devachan. But let us remember what it was like when our souls were incarnated during the Egyptian culture. At that time, we looked up at the gigantic pyramids and other great buildings. In earlier times, things looked very, very different on this side, the physical side. Let us think of how the face of the earth has changed very, very much since then. We need only follow materialistic science to find, for example, that a few thousand years ago there were completely different animals in Europe, and that Europe looked completely different. The face of the earth is constantly changing, and that is why human beings always enter into new conditions of existence. This seems quite obvious to everyone. But when one describes the conditions of the spiritual world, people are so quick to believe that what happened in the spiritual world when they died, say, a thousand years before Christ, that what happened over there was exactly the same as what is happening today, when they are reborn today and die again today.

[ 6 ] Just as the physical plane changes, so too do the conditions in the other world. The stay in Devachan was quite different from today when one entered Devachan from Egyptian or Greek life. There, too, an evolution is taking place. It is only natural that we now describe the present conditions of Devachan; but the conditions have changed. We can already assume this when we look at what the last lectures and their descriptions have brought us.

[ 7 ] We have seen how, when we go further back to the Atlantean time, human beings lived more in the spiritual world, how they moved in the spiritual world during sleep. We found that this then gradually diminished. However, if we go back far enough, we find that human beings lived entirely in the spiritual world. In ancient times, the difference between sleep and death was not so great. In the distant past, human beings had long periods of sleep. This coincided roughly with the period that is now called an incarnation and is passed through by life after death. As humans descended to the physical plane, they became increasingly entangled in it. It has been shown how the Indians looked up to a higher world and how the Persians already attempted to conquer the physical plane. Human beings descended further and further, and a marriage between spirit and matter, between the spiritual worlds and the physical plane, came about in the Greco-Latin period. The more human beings lived in the midst of this last epoch, the more they learned to love the physical world and take an interest in it. But this also changed everything we call experiences between death and rebirth.

[ 8 ] If we go back to the earliest period of the post-Atlantean epoch, we find that people had little interest in the physical plane. The initiates of that time could be transported to higher worlds, to the devachanic worlds, and they then shared their experiences with other people. In people who felt themselves being transported with all their thoughts and senses into the true world, into their real home, this meant that they had little interest in the conditions of the physical plane. But when they advanced into the devachan, having hardly connected with the physical world, they possessed a relatively clear consciousness in the devachan. When such a person then reincarnated in the Persian culture, he felt more attached to physical matter, and so he lost some of the clarity of consciousness he had had in Devachan. In the Egyptian-Chaldean period, when people began to love the outer physical world, they already had a very clouded, shadowy consciousness in Devachan. This consciousness was still higher in nature than the consciousness in the physical world, but it sank lower and lower in degree and became darker and darker until the Greek-Latin period. During this period, the Devachanic consciousness became increasingly dark and shadowy. It was not a dream consciousness; it never was. It was a consciousness that one could pay attention to; it was still a consciousness of which man was aware. An darkening of this consciousness therefore took place as evolution progressed.

[ 9 ] The mysteries were essentially there to enable human beings not only to have a shadowy consciousness in the spiritual world, but also to brighten up their consciousness again. Let us imagine that there had been no mysteries, that there had been no initiates. Then human beings would have had an increasingly dim, increasingly shadowy consciousness in the spiritual worlds. It was only because the initiation into the mysteries took place parallel to the darkening of consciousness in Devachan, and with it the acquisition of certain abilities with which select individuals were already able to see into the spiritual worlds in bright clarity, solely because the initiates were able to report on this in myths and legends, did a shading of something brighter, something lighter, enter into the devachanic consciousness between death and a new birth. But for all those who had already found their way into the physical world, it was so that they already felt this dimming of consciousness in the spiritual world, and it is no fairy tale, it is truth, that the initiate in the Eleusinian mysteries was able to have a very special experience. The principle of initiation is that human beings can ascend into the spiritual worlds during their lifetime and experience what goes on there. The initiates of that time were indeed able to experience the shadows in the spiritual world directly. It is truly a saying of an initiate when he says: Oh, better to be a beggar in the physical world than a king in the realm of shadows. This statement is spoken from the experience of the initiates. We cannot take such things deeply enough, and we only understand them when we know the facts of the spiritual world.

[ 10 ] Now let us put into a more concrete form what was indicated yesterday in abstract form.

[ 11 ] If nothing else had happened except for humans descending into the physical world, consciousness would have become increasingly darker between death and a new birth. Humans would have ultimately lost all connection with the spiritual world. Now, it may seem strange to those who are even slightly afflicted by some form of materialism, but what I am about to say is true. If nothing had happened in the development of humanity, humanity would have fallen into spiritual death. But there is a possibility of enlightenment of consciousness between death and a new birth, and this enlightenment can be achieved either through initiation itself or, already today, to a lesser degree, through that human beings already participate in the spiritual world in this life, that they already have experiences that do not die with their bodies, that remain connected with them in their eternal core of being, even in the spiritual world. This was ensured by the mysteries, by the entire spiritual development, by the great initiates before Christ, and above all by the Being itself whom we know as Christ. All other initiates were in a sense precursors of Christ; they were forerunners who pointed to the appearance of Christ.

[ 12 ] Let us now describe the appearance of the Christ figure. Let us imagine a person who had never heard anything about Christ, who had never been able to take in the secrets of the Gospel of John, who had never been able to say to himself: I want to follow the Christ who lives and works, I want to take his principles into my being. Let us imagine, then, that Christ never came near such a person, that he could not take with him into the spiritual world the treasure that human beings must take with them today if they want to avoid the darkening of their consciousness. What man takes with him as ideas about Christ is a power that illuminates consciousness after death, that saves man from the fate that would have befallen him if Christ had not appeared. If Christ had not appeared, human beings would have continued to exist, but their consciousness would not have been able to become clear after death. This is what gives the appearance of Christ its real significance, that something of far-reaching importance is incorporated into the core of the human being. The event of Golgotha saves human beings from spiritual death if they identify it with their own being.

[ 13 ] We must not believe that other great leaders of humanity did not have a similar significance. It is not a question of claiming exclusive dogma for Christianity. That would be a violation of true Christianity, for anyone who knows the facts knows that Christianity was also taught in the ancient mysteries. And a statement such as that made by Augustine is profoundly true: “What is now called the Christian religion already existed among the ancients and was not lacking in the beginnings of the human race until Christ appeared in the flesh, from which point on the true religion, which already existed, received the name of Christian.” It does not matter what one calls it, but that one understands correctly the meaning of the Christ impulse. And just as Christ was the figure who appeared at the lowest point of evolution, so it was with Buddha, Hermes, and the other great beings, that they had the prophetic consciousness that Christ would come, that he lived in them themselves.

[ 14 ] We can see this particularly clearly when we study the figure of Buddha, and we must realize what he was. What was Buddha actually? We must touch upon something here that can only be said among students of spiritual science. People, even theosophists, usually imagine the mysteries of reincarnation to be much too simple. One must not imagine that any soul that is embodied today in its three bodies simply incarnated in a previous incarnation and then again in a previous incarnation, which was preceded by another, always according to the same pattern. The mysteries are much more complicated. Despite A. P. Blavatsky's best efforts to show her close students how complicated these mysteries are, they are still not properly understood today. People simply imagine that a soul goes into a body again and again. It is not that simple. We often cannot fit a historical figure into such a pattern if we want to understand them properly. We often have to take a much more complicated approach.

[ 15 ] In Atlantis, we already encounter beings who surround humans like our fellow human beings today, but whom humans saw and got to know when they were spiritually elevated in the spiritual world. It has already been said how he got to know Thor, Zeus, Wotan, and Baldur as real companions there. During the day, he lived in the physical world, but in another state of consciousness, he got to know spiritual beings who had not undergone the same course of development as he had. In the primeval times of the earth, human beings did not yet have such dense bodies as they do today; at a certain stage, there was no question of a skeleton. The Atlantean body could only be seen to a certain extent with physical eyes. But there were beings who only descended far enough to incarnate in an etheric body. Then there were beings who, at that time when the air was still filled with water vapors, still embodied themselves. At that time, when human beings still lived in the water-mist atmosphere, such incarnations were still possible for them. One such being was, for example, the later Wotan. He said to himself: If human beings can incarnate themselves in this light-fluid matter, then I can do the same. Such a being took on human form and walked around in the physical world. But then, as the earth became denser and humans took on denser forms, Wotan said to himself: No, I will not enter this dense matter. He then remained in invisible worlds, in worlds more removed from the earth. This was the case with all divine-spiritual beings.

[ 16 ] From then on, however, they were able to do something else. They were able to enter into a kind of connection with people who came toward them, who were developing from below. Let us think of it this way: The course of human development was such that it reached its lowest point. Up to this point, the gods accompanied the humans. But then they took a different path, one that was invisible to humans on the physical plane. But if there were people who lived their lives according to the instructions of initiates and thereby purified their finer bodies, they came, as it were, to meet the gods; so that when the human being embodied in the flesh purified himself, he was able to do so in such a way that he was able to be overshadowed by such a being who could not descend to the physical body. The physical body would have been too coarse for such a being. For such a person, the astral body and the etheric body were permeated by such a higher being, which otherwise had no human form for itself, but which entered into another being and manifested itself through another being.

[ 17 ] If we are familiar with this phenomenon, then we will not find it so easy to imagine incarnation. There may well be a human being who is the reincarnation of a former human being who has developed highly, who has purified his three bodies to such an extent that he is now a vessel for a higher being. And so Buddha became a vessel for Wotan. The same being who was called Wotan in Germanic mythology reappeared as Buddha. Buddha and Wotan are even linguistically related. We can say that much of what were the secrets of the Atlantean era was transferred to what Buddha was able to proclaim. And so it is consistent that what Buddha experienced is something that the gods had experienced in those spiritual spheres, which humans had also experienced when they themselves were still in those spheres. When the teachings of Wotan reappeared, they were teachings that took little account of the physical plane, emphasizing only that the physical plane is a place of suffering and that liberation from it means a great deal — for there was much of the Wotan presence in the Buddha. That is why those who were latecomers from Atlantis showed the deepest understanding of the Buddha's teachings. Among the Asian population there are those who have remained behind, who as races have remained entirely at the Atlantean stage. Of course, outwardly they had to progress with the development of the earth. Much of Atlantis has remained in the Mongolian peoples; they are stragglers from the ancient population of Atlantis. The stationary tendency in the Mongolian population is such an inheritance from Atlantis. Therefore, the teachings of Buddha are particularly suited to such peoples, and Buddhism has made great progress among them.

[ 18 ] The world progresses, it follows its course. Those who can look into the development of the world do not choose, they do not say, I prefer this or that, they say: These are spiritual necessities, which religion a people has. And because the European population has become entangled in the physical world, it is impossible for them to empathize with Buddhism, to identify with the innermost teachings of Buddha. Buddhism could never become a religion for all of humanity. For those who want to see, there is no sympathy or antipathy, but only judgment based on facts. Just as it would be wrong to try to spread Christianity from a center in Asia, where other peoples live, so Buddhism is wrong for the European population. No religious view is correct unless it is created for the innermost needs of the time; such a view can never give a cultural impulse. These are things that must be understood if one really wants to understand the connections.

[ 19 ] But one must not believe that the historical figure of the Buddha was aware of everything that was present in his appearance. If I wanted to explain all this, I would need several hours. We are still far from exhausting the complexity of the historical Buddha. There was something else living in the Buddha. It is not just an entity that came over from the Atlantean era and embodied itself in someone who also happened to be a human Buddha; there was something else in him, something of which he could say: I cannot yet comprehend this, it is something that animates me, but I only participate in it. This is the Christ being. It already animated the great prophets. It was a well-known being in the older mysteries, and everywhere people pointed to the one who was to come.

[ 20 ] And he came! But he came again, submitting himself to the historical necessities that underlie evolution. He could not have incarnated in a physical body without further ado. It was still possible for him to incarnate in the Buddha, as it were in a kind of subconsciousness. But walking on earth, he could only incarnate if a physical body, an etheric body, and an astral body had been specially prepared. Christ had the greatest power of action, but he could only incarnate when a physical body, etheric body, and astral body had been completely purified and cleansed by another being. And so the incarnation of Christ could only take place when a being appeared who had developed so highly. That was Jesus of Nazareth. He had advanced so far in his development that during his life he was able to purify his physical body, etheric body, and astral body to such an extent that in the thirtieth year of his life he was able to leave these bodies, but in such a way that they were still viable and usable for a higher being. Often, when I have said that a high stage of development was necessary for Jesus to sacrifice his bodies, people have made a very strange objection: But that is no sacrifice at all, what could be more beautiful? One cannot speak of a great sacrifice when it is a matter of surrendering one's bodies to such a high being. Yes, it is beautiful, and the sacrifice would not be great if one abstracted it in this way. But one might reply: Let us do it once; everyone would be willing to make the sacrifice, but let us try it once. It is necessary to have tremendous powers to purify one's bodies so that one can leave them behind and still remain alive. Sacrifices are necessary to attain these powers. Jesus of Nazareth had to be an extraordinarily high individuality to be able to do this. The Gospel of John indicates when Jesus left his physical body, etheric body, and astral body and entered the spiritual world, and when the Christ being entered into the threefold body. This happened at the baptism of Jesus in the Jordan. Something very significant happened in the physical body of Jesus of Nazareth. Again, what I am about to say must be abhorrent to a materialistic mind. Something special took place, even in the physical body of Jesus of Nazareth. If we want to understand what happened at the moment of baptism, when Christ entered into Jesus, we must first bring to mind something that will seem quite strange, but is nevertheless true.

[ 21 ] In the course of human evolution, individual organs developed gradually, becoming more and more differentiated. We have seen how, when the organs reached the middle of the hips, certain structures and functions entered into the human being. In this increasing independence of the human individuality, a hardening of the skeletal system also took place. The more independent humans became, the more their skeletal system hardened, but the more the power of death also grew. We must now pay attention to this if we want to understand what follows in the right way. Why is it that humans must die, that the body decays completely? It is because there is something in the human body that can be burned: the bones. Fire also has power over the substance of human bones. Man has no power, at least no conscious power, over his bones. This power lies beyond the power of man. At the moment when Christ entered the body of Jesus of Nazareth at the baptism in the Jordan, the skeletal system of this being became something completely different from that of other human beings. This was a case that had never happened before and has never happened since, even to this day. Something entered the Jesus being with the Christ being that had power over the forces that burn bones. Today, it is not yet within human power to build bones. But this power reached into the bones. The conscious power of the Christ being reached into the bones; this is part of the meaning of John's baptism. With this, something was transplanted into the earth that can be called the supremacy over death, for it is with the bones that death first came into the world. Through the power over the bones entering the human body, the overcoming of death came into the world. This expresses a profound mystery: something most sacred, something of the highest order, entered into the bone structure of Jesus of Nazareth through Christ. That is why it could not be touched. That is why the words of Scripture had to be fulfilled: “You shall not break a bone of him.” Human power would have interfered with the powers of God. Here we see a very profound mystery of human development.

[ 22 ] And this brings us at the same time to a very significant concept of esoteric Christianity, which can show us how this Christianity is imbued with the highest truths. We come to what else we encounter in baptism. Through the fact that the Christ Being took possession of the three bodies, of that in which the I-being of Jesus had previously been, a Being was now linked to the earth that had previously had its dwelling place on the sun. It had been connected to the earth until the moment when the sun left the earth. Christ went out with it and from then on could only develop his power from outside, into the earth. At the moment of baptism, the high Christ Spirit reunited with the earth in the full sense. Before that, he worked from outside, overshadowed the prophets, and worked in the mysteries. Now he was incarnated in a physical human body on earth itself. And if a being from a distant point in the universe had been able to look down for thousands of years, then such a being, who would have seen not only the physical Earth but also its spiritual currents, its astral body and etheric body, would have seen significant events at the moment of John's baptism and at the moment when the blood flowed from Christ's wounds on Golgotha. The astral body of the Earth was thoroughly changed by this. At that moment, it took on something else, took on different colors. A new power was incorporated into the Earth. That which previously acted from outside was reconnected with the earth, and through this the gravitational pull between the sun and the earth will become so strong that the sun and the earth will reunite, and human beings with the sun spirits. It was Christ who made it possible for the earth to reunite with the sun and then be in the bosom of the Godhead.

[ 23 ] This is the process that took place and its significance. We had to say this first to make it clear how significant it was when Christ came to Earth. And we can understand how, through union with Christ, humans can take in something that can brighten their consciousness after death. If we keep this in mind, we will also be able to understand how there is an evolution between death and new birth. Let us now ask ourselves, for whose sake did all this actually happen?

[ 24 ] First, man lived in the bosom of the Godhead. Then he descended to the physical plane. If he had remained above, he would never have attained his present self-consciousness. He would never have received an I. Only in the physical body could he kindle self-consciousness in its bright clarity. External objects had to confront him, he had to be able to distinguish himself from objects, he had to descend into the physical world. It was only for the sake of the human ego that man descended. Man is descended from the gods in terms of his ego. It descended from the spiritual world; it was forged to the physical body so that it could become bright and clear. Precisely that which appeared as the hardened matter of the human body gave human beings their self-conscious I, made it possible for them to acquire knowledge. But it also forged them to the earth mass, to the rock mass.

[ 25 ] Before acquiring its ego, man had acquired a physical body, an etheric body, and an astral body. As the ego gradually developed in these three bodies, it transformed them. It must be clearly understood that all the higher members of the human being work on the physical body. The fact that the physical body is as it is depends on the etheric body, the astral body, and the ego working on it. All the organs of the physical body depend in a certain way on the higher members also having been transformed. The entities that remained behind became the various animal forms, for example birds, through the domination of the astral body. As the ego became more and more self-conscious, it also changed the astral body. It has already been said that human beings separated. What are called apocalyptic animals are types in which this or that higher member has the upper hand. The ego has gained the upper hand in human beings. Now all organs are adapted to the higher members of the human being. As the ego entered the astral body and completely permeated it, certain organs formed in humans and in the animals that later branched off. For example, a certain organ originates from the fact that an ego entered the earth at all. On the moon, no ego was connected with the beings of human evolution. Certain organs are connected with this development: the gall and the liver. The gall is the physical expression of the astral body. It is not connected with the ego, but the ego acts upon the astral body, and from the astral body the forces act upon the gall.

[ 26 ] Now let us summarize the whole picture that the initiate made so clear to the Egyptians: The ego-conscious human being has been bound to the earthly body. Imagine human beings bound to the rocks of the earth, that is, bound to the physical body, and in the course of evolution something has arisen that gnaws at their immortality! Imagine the functions that the liver has brought about: they arose because the body was forged to the rocks of the earth. The astral body gnaws at it.

[ 27 ] This is the image that was given to the student in Egypt, and which migrated to Greece as the Prometheus myth. One must not touch such a myth with coarse hands. One must not rob such an image of its substance like a butterfly of its dust. We must leave the dust on the wings, we must leave the dew on the flower. These images cannot be torn and tortured. We must not say: Prometheus means this or that; we must try to present the real occult facts, and then try to understand the images that arose from the occult facts and passed into human consciousness.

[ 28 ] The Egyptian initiate led his pupil to the stage where he could understand the development of the human ego. Such an image was to shape his mind. But the student was not to grasp the facts with crude fists; rather, the image was to stand light and alive before him, and the Egyptian initiate did not want to press banal, dry concepts into truths, but to represent in images what he could give. Much has been done in the Prometheus legend by poetry, which has embellished and decorated it, and we must not put into it more than the occult facts are, leaving only the artistic activity its fine creative powers. Now let us point to something else. When human beings arrived on earth, they were not yet endowed with the ego. Before the ego was mysteriously incorporated into the astral body, other forces possessed the astral body. Then the light-fluid astral body was permeated by the ego. Before the ego was there, the astral forces had been sent into the human being from outside by divine spiritual beings. The astral body was also there, but it was permeated by divine spiritual beings. The astral body was pure and bright and surrounded what was there as the physical and etheric bodies. It surrounded and permeated it; the flow of the astral body was pure. But with the entry of the ego, egoism entered, and the astral body became darkened. The pure golden flow of the astral body was lost, and it was lost more and more until human beings had descended to the lowest point of the physical plane in the Greco-Latin period.

[ 29 ] Then people had to think about regaining the pure flow of the astral body, and in the Eleusinian Mysteries there arose what was called the search for the original purity of the astral body. The Eleusinian Mysteries wanted to restore the astral body to its original pure golden flow, and so did the Egyptians. The search for the golden stream was one of the trials of the Egyptian initiations, and this has been preserved for us in the wonderful legend of Jason and the Argonauts' quest for the Golden Fleece.

[ 30 ] We have seen the development: when the lower organs still resembled the boats we have spoken of, the astral body still had its golden glow in the watery earth. In the water earth, man had his astral body illuminated by gold. The search for this astral body is depicted in the Argonaut expedition. We must bring the search for the Golden Fleece together with the Egyptian myth in a subtle way.

[ 31 ] Outer historical facts are linked to spiritual facts. One must not believe that this is merely symbolic. The Argonauts' quest really took place, just as the Trojan War took place. Outer events are physiognomies for inner events; all of these are historical events. Again and again, the historical event took place inwardly in the Greek initiates: the quest for the Golden Fleece, the attainment of the pure astral body.

[ 32 ] That is what we wanted to keep in mind, and from that starting point we will learn more about the mysteries and then discover how the Egyptian mysteries relate to life today.